The alternative is what has always been the lot of Hungary, the decision to find her support in Teutonic Central Europe at the price of industrial inequality and political vassalage. It is probable that when Russia returns to her old self she will resume her Balkan policy. This will drive Italy once again, with sounder reason than last time, into an alliance with Germany. Then Hungary, mourning her lost provinces, will be a valuable ally.
The Paris Conference had a glorious chance to detach Hungary permanently from dependence on Central Europe and make it worth her while to live an independent life. It was in the power of the conference to draw the frontiers of Hungary along ethnographic lines, using one weight and one measure in dealing with the border-land claims of all the Danubian states. This great occasion was missed.
Two influences from the outside have given new life and hope to the smoldering fires of Hungarian Nationalism. For a while after Admiral Horthy and the Whites overcame the Communists, Hungary was prostrate. The people were apathetic. The Treaty of Trianon was a crushing blow, and there was the tendency to regard it as definitive. But the attitude of the Entente Powers themselves, first in encouraging Turkey to resist the application of the Treaty of Sèvres and second in agreeing ignominiously to make a new treaty with the Turks when Mustapha Kemal Pasha successfully defied the Entente decrees, has given new hope to the Hungarians. What the Angora Nationalists did—the Turks are kinsmen of the Hungarians—the Magyars can do. All they have to wait for, as has been demonstrated by the events in Asia Minor, is fresh discord or simply lack of harmony among the Entente Powers. Then the Hungarians feel that they may not have to wait for the recovery of Germany, but can get the help of the Italians against the Little Entente. Is this an absurd hope? Experience makes justifiable an emphatic negative!
The other inspiration that has come from abroad is the success of Fascismo in Italy. The Hungarians have long had “the wakeners,” an organization formed as the Fascisti group was formed to suppress Communism and Socialism. The August, 1922, revolution in Rome strengthened immeasurably the influence of “the awakeners” in Budapest, where, in the Wenkheim Palace, a new society, closely modeled on the Fascisti, and with similar rites, is aiming to set up a Fascist government.
The “Argrad Blood Association” and the “Turanian Association” are moving for a Hungarian alliance with Mohammedanism. More significant still is the “Hungarian Defense League,” a militarist organization of former officers which still controls secretly the notorious military “Detachments” that played the decisive rôle in suppressing Bolshevism. These various organizations have recently spread into Slovakia, Bukowina, Transylvania, and the Banat of Temesvár. The Succession States are beginning to experience the inconvenience of holding large alien populations.
The only factor in the situation that prevents the irredentist movements from being already serious—alarmingly serious—is the agrarian question. Hungary is still under the domination of the land-owning classes, while peasant proprietorship has won its way in Rumania and Jugoslavia and is making progress in Slovakia. Most of the large landowners in the now “unredeemed” lands of Hungary are Hungarian aristocrats; and the peasants, although Magyars, knowing the failure of land partition to make progress in Hungary, are not sure that they would be better off if they returned to their old allegiance. Up to this time the oppression of Hungarians in the liberated states has been confined to landowners and townspeople; and the Hungarian peasants have, in fact, profited by this.
The agrarian question, until it is settled by the disappearance of great estates, plays a rôle the importance of which can hardly be overestimated in the newly awakened national rivalries in border-lands from the Baltic to the Black Sea. The Poles are confronted, for instance, with an embarrassing dilemma. They want to drive the Germanic influence out of the Baltic states because it is a menace to their ambitions. But German influence in the territories ceded by the Treaty of Versailles to Poland and in the Baltic states is based upon the landed aristocracy, which is the foundation of Polish influence in the Russian border-lands and Eastern Galicia. Advocating agrarian laws helps Poland in some places and acts as a tremendous boomerang in other places! So it is with the encouragement of irredentist movements. If nationalism finds its support largely with the aristocracy, and they have to go to the peasant masses in coveted border-lands to spread their movement, when the “unredeemed” regions are added to the so-called mother-land, the promoters of the irredentist movement are the first to suffer. It has recently happened that way in Rumania. To-day Hungarians, both peasants and proprietors, are wondering which is the more important, national pride or class interest.
When we study problems and reconstruction in a topsyturvy world, we find that they are not new problems. They are old problems, couched in different terms, perhaps, and clothed a bit differently. But they are the same problems for all that; is not geography the same, distribution of wealth the same, and human nature the same?